ermanent in their character.

It must be said that this Academy is rather a respectable and slow-moving
institutution. The most illustrious names of France are not always
included in the list of its members. Neither Beranger nor Lamenais belong
to it. A writer in the Paris _National_ says that after three hours at
its meeting everybody he met in the street seemed to belong to the time
of Louis XI.

* * * * *

EDWARD EVERETT has been many years engaged in the collection and
arrangement of materials for a systematic Treatise on the Modern Law of
Nations; more especially in reference to those questions which nave been
discussed between the governments of the United States and Europe since
the Peace of 1783. This will be Mr. Everett's "life poem." Hitherto he
has written nothing very long except the "Defense of the Christian
Religion," published when he was about twenty-one years of age. We have
just received from Little & Brown their edition of the "Orations and
Speeches" of Mr. Everett, in two very large and richly-printed volumes,
which we shall hereafter notice more largely. These are to be followed,
at the author's leisure, by his Political Reports and Speeches and
Official Papers, in two large volumes, and his contributions to the
_North American Review_, which, if all included, we think will make four
others: so that his works, beside the new treatise above mentioned, will
be completed in not less than eight volumes. We are gratified at the
prospect of such a collection of these masterpieces of rhetoric, so full
of learning and wisdom, and infused by so genial a spirit. We wish some
publisher would give us in the same style all the writings of Alexander
Everett.

CHARLES MACKAY has lately published in London, a work upon which he had
long been engaged, under the title of "Progress of the Intellect." We
suspect, from the reviewals of it which appear in the journals, that it
is of the German free thinking class of philosophical histories. It
embraces dissertations on Intellectual Religion, Ancient Cosmogony, the
Metaphysical Idea of God, the Moral Notion of God, the Theory of
Mediation, Hebrew Theory of Retribution and Immortality, the Messianic
Theory prevailing in the days of Jesus, Christian Forms and Reforms, and
Speculative Christianity. And these dissertations are written with an
eloquence and power unexampled in a work of so much learning.

* * * *